Before the beta update: If you uploaded an image to your private account and linked someone to the image (not gallery, just sharing a link over email or private chat) then the person you shared is not able to see it’s associated with your account.

After the beta update: Same scenario, but now they see “by [username]” above the image.
Example - https://imgur.com/kd5BMkc (This is an unlisted image I haven’t submitted to the gallery, usually you’d just see the image and date but now you see my username)

Now the choice is between:

Use an account - easy to find your own images, easy to delete your own images, but unable to share your images without people seeing your username.

No account - need to bookmark all your images, can’t delete them unless you bookmark the deletion links too, but you can share images without people seeing a username.

Previously I could use my account to show screenshots to online and IRL friends, and professional clients. It was a simple image sharer.
Now I can’t. I’d need to start using different accounts and that’s just getting messy.

My suggestion is if you have “Private: Images will only be accessible via the direct URL or within public albums” as your option, don’t show the username on the image. Unless it has been submitted to the imgur gallery (usersub, frontpage, whatever).

Now that’s better. I’ll give you a B. An A grade response would include at last one use of the phrase “shadow ban” and an assumption that this effect of the update was initiated by imgur staff at the behest of an illuminati organization in order to secretly harvest inheriting users’ souls.

I’m assuming you mean someone being able just to transform one link to the other, but I also think don’t think most people that don’t spend a lot of time on imgur are going to know to do that. It’s not perfect, but it’ll work for a lot of people.

If you’re that worried about people seeing your username when you share images, create a dedicated account for it that you only use to upload images. I’m just trying to provide suggestions, not provide for every foil hat contingency.

It doesn’t take much to know that i.imgur.com/IDENT.suf and imgur.com/IDENT are usually the same, and you can expect some number of people to do that either accidentally or deliberately. (Previously it was a way to identify the poster of an image in the gallery, for example.) Someone used to seeing the html page form might prefer that for some reason. The new change makes it happen all the time, which might or might not be deliberate.

It might be a mistake in that the coder thought it was a good thing and made it happen.

It might be deliberate to show that the information is not private and should not be considered so:

Checking the /2/ api endpoint, I do not get the username or account_id in the output. (And /1/ gives a 404 error.) So at some point the API changed the information given out (or I’m using /2/ incorrectly, not sure if there are docs for that version still out there).

It was an anonymous image sharer, then accounts were added. Images grouped into an account did not show the account owner, but gave the owner more control, such as easier location and deletion of images. It seems as Imgur has become more of a destination site instead of just a hosting site, things are changing.

It wouldn’t be a problem if it was always like this. People have been sharing links to images for a long time taking into account that the images wouldn’t be publicly associated with their account. Suddenly, those images can be traced back to them. Something Imgur shouldn’t have done.
But if Imgur really believes this is a necessary change, they should’ve at least notified users in advance they were going to expose them, so users could have taken steps to remove those images.